Narrow majorities are an under-appreciated force shaping the contemporary Congress.
In his characteristically excellent inaugural column for the Washington Post this week, Ramesh argues for worrying about this Congress breaching the debt ceiling, at least briefly, and expresses some perplexity at the widespread complaisance about that prospect. Josh Barro responds with a serious and intelligent case for complaisance. Fred Bauer, at City Journal, offers another very thoughtful case for relative optimism — or at least for imagining how a breach could be avoided.
I think Ramesh is right. The debt-ceiling challenge was pretty much the first thing that came to mind for me when the results of last year’s midterms first became apparent. And I would add one point to the persuasive case Ramesh makes in his column, which might also speak to some of Barro’s and Bauer’s responses. Along with the reasons Ramesh offers for thinking the debt-ceiling might well be briefly breached this time around, I would point to the simple fact of the narrowness of the Republican majority in the House. The extremely narrow margin makes it especially hard for Republicans to maneuver, in a way that could well make this iteration of the debt-ceiling debate distinctly different from any other in the modern Congress.
That narrow margin in a divided Congress is really what makes this moment different in general. Ask yourself this basic question: Why did Republicans struggle to elect a speaker earlier this month? Why did the process go to multiple rounds for the first time in a century? Was it because the House Freedom Caucus in this Congress is somehow different in character or scope from what it has been over the past decade? It isn’t really. Was it because Kevin McCarthy is somehow unfit to be speaker or uniquely unpopular with his colleagues? Not at all. It is because Republicans could only afford to lose four of their members if they wanted to reach a majority. That’s a very small number.
In a group of 222 politicians, whatever its ideological dynamics, there could easily be at least that many cantankerous grumps who want no part of any consensus, whatever it is. Think of those votes to name a post office in Kansas after some recently deceased state judge, that end up something like 420 to eight. Have you ever wondered who those eight “no” votes are and what they’re thinking? It’s not the case that the entire Freedom Caucus consists of that type. But when it only takes four, and when lots of Republicans answer to primary voters who are more impressed by hearing about how their member made other politicians mad than how their member was part of a coalition that got a bill passed, you’re going to have a very hard time keeping that kind of member on board. Those members are always around, but in this congress they are enough to deny Republicans a working majority.
Josh Barro argues that the 2015 debt-ceiling deal could be a model for what happens this year. And it could be. But Republicans had a 59-seat House majority in that Congress (and a relatively comfortable Senate majority too), which gave them much more room to maneuver. Fred Bauer points to 1996, which certainly involved a tighter House, but that was still a 26-seat majority (and, again, a Republican Senate).
In the modern Congress, the two closest analogies to today’s narrow majority were in 2001-03 and in the last two years. In the first instance, the September 11th attacks fairly quickly transformed the tone and dynamics of Washington. And in the second instance, when Nancy Pelosi led a majority exactly as small as the one Kevin McCarthy must now wrangle, she had both the Senate and the presidency in her party’s hands, which meant she could just make the House a rubber stamp for whatever made it through the Senate. Even that wasn’t easy, but it was much easier than what Republicans are looking at now.
Narrow majorities are an under-appreciated force shaping the contemporary Congress. They are responsible for a lot of the character of the institution in its modern incarnation — that is, since Republicans won their first House majority in four decades in 1994. In the 100 years before the 1994 election, the average House majority was 83 seats. The average in the 1980s was 79 seats. In the 1970s, it was 109 seats. In the 1960s, it was 88. But in the almost 30 years since the 1994 election, the average House majority has been 32 seats. In both this Congress and the last one, it has been nine seats.
Here’s a look at House majorities since the end of the Civil War, measured as a percentage of the House to account for changes in the size of the House over time. (It’s a chart I produced for another piece taking up this subject a few months ago.) The modern Congress really stands out for narrow majorities, and this Congress and the last one are particularly deadlocked:
We often confuse this kind of deadlock with polarization, but they are different things. A polarized politics doesn’t have to be deadlocked at 50-50. But our politics has been deadlocked that way for most of the past generation, and that has been reflected in narrow House majorities, among other things. Perhaps ironically, narrow majorities find it harder to compromise than broad ones do: They tend to be more cohesive because they have less of a margin for experimentation and risk taking.
That could well make the models of past debt-ceiling deals hard to follow this time. In 1996, as Bauer notes, a deal to raise the debt-ceiling was reached by attaching the increase to a bill that had passed with a massive bipartisan majority in the House (and unanimously in the Senate). It is very hard to imagine any such bill in this Congress. In 2015, both parties felt the pinch of the budget caps that had been established a few years earlier, and so entered the process under real pressure to act. It was almost as if the debt ceiling was a bargaining chip in a fight where raising spending levels (on defense for Republicans, non-defense for Democrats) was the real necessity, rather than the other way around. That won’t be the case this time. And at the outset, Republicans won’t have much room to reach for a deal that relies on lots of Democratic votes.
At least at first, Speaker McCarthy is likely to be very reticent to go for a bipartisan move, as it would be extremely unpopular in large swaths of his conference, and his speakership always hangs by a four-member thread. Eventually, he will almost certainly have to move a debt-ceiling increase that relies on significant numbers of Democrats — if only because such an increase needs to pass the narrowly Democratic Senate and not just the narrowly Republican House. But that probably won’t be doable until both parties feel some pinch of pain, as they did in 2015. It’s hard to see where that comes from except a breach of the debt ceiling, or at least something very close to it.
That’s not to say that the models of past debt-ceiling deals aren’t very relevant. They surely are. But this Congress began with a multi-ballot Speaker election of a sort not seen before in the modern era, so it is reasonable to assume that it will also struggle with other must-pass votes that recent congresses have managed to get through.
One countervailing reason for hope is that everyone is already talking about this. We are more than six months from the real debt-ceiling deadline, and the fact that Washington is already intensely focused on how to get through it suggests that some way forward could emerge before the hammer comes down. But the problem to be solved is different from those confronted by other recent congresses, and getting through it will take a strategy that takes account of that.